A New Prescription for Impact: Alumnus Johans Acosta’s Journey Into AI
Johans Acosta grew up alongside a brother with severe epilepsy. He saw what it took from his brother and what it asked of his family, and he wanted to do something about it.
So the Orange County native made a plan: he would become a pediatric neurosurgeon. When he got into his teens, he changed course.
“I decided it wasn’t for me,” said Acosta (’21, computer information systems and marketing management). “I wanted to find a way to make an impact without going through 14 or 15 years of school.”
Today, instead of spending his days in the operating room, Acosta works in the artificial intelligence (AI) field, shaping how AI technology gets built and adopted at one of the world's largest technology companies. Reshaping how we solve problems, make decisions and understand the world around us.
From Medicine to Emerging Technologies
It may look like a dramatic career pivot. For Acosta, the move to artificial intelligence was more of an evolution.
Growing up, Acosta was a curious kid.
“I asked a lot of questions,” he said. “I just wanted to understand things to completion.”
He barely spoke English as a first grader, improving his reading with the help of a Leapfrog device. That experience taught him an important lesson — that technology could help a student who struggled with a language and had a speech impediment become a top student.
“Once I started learning English well and started speaking, I would get frustrated that I couldn’t learn more,” he said. “I have always been an independent learner and a self-starter. If I wanted to learn something, I would go to the library and read books.”
At Saddleback Community College, Acosta was on the medical track when his chemistry professor encouraged him to pursue business instead. He felt that Acosta’s analytical and technical ability as well as his curiosity and people-oriented nature would make business a perfect fit.
“He noticed that I was a natural leader, detail-oriented and got my work done quickly,” Acosta said. “He told me, ‘You should be a decision maker.’”
After transferring to Cal Poly Pomona in 2018, his interest in entrepreneurship deepened when he participated in the NASA-CPP Business Start Up Program, in which students translate NASA technology into everyday products that can be mass marketed.
“It was a life-changing program,” he said. “It taught me how to take new technology and turn it into something that benefits people. That's still the core of what I do today.”
The program also opened up the world of technology for Acosta and showed him how vast that world was, he added.
While at CPP, Acosta met a venture capital investor in Silicon Valley. That connection took him to conferences and introduced him to emerging technology in the financial sector.
“It opened my mind to new ways of doing things,” he said. “I envisioned working in venture capital and creating an impact fund to support marginalized groups and people of color. I wanted to be closer to the cutting edge.”
During his college years, Acosta advised AI startups through a boutique venture capital firm and launched two bootstrapped startups of his own. After graduation, he took on a significant role at home. After college, he found a remote position at IBM that allowed him to work from home and care for his maternal grandmother, who was ill at the time and has since passed. He began as an infrastructure and cloud engineer before moving into AI and automation. He also earned a Client Engineering Excellence Award for his work on an AI project that helped transform COBOL code into Java.
At the Forefront of AI
After three years at IBM, Acosta joined Splunk, a technology company that helps its clients navigate their digital systems — from detecting cyber threats to figuring out why a computer network suddenly stops working.
Acosta is Splunk's Global AI/ML Strategist and go-to-market lead, shaping how the company brings its AI products to market across security, observability and its core platform. He trains the sales and solutions engineers who work with customers worldwide, advises the company's largest clients on AI architecture, and speaks at industry conferences on agentic AI.
He has been at the center of Splunk’s shift from traditional AI assistants that respond to questions to “agentic” AI systems that can determine what steps to take, use tools and act on their own to accomplish a goal.
“I'm in a position now where I can shape how these things get built, and I take that seriously,” he said.
Technology With a Purpose
Acosta’s approach to AI projects is informed by who he is as a person — a Latino, a first-generation American with immigrant parents from El Salvador, a helper by nature, a caregiver to his late grandmother and the brother of someone with epilepsy.
He uses all of that to challenge the status quo and push for projects that make a difference, he said.
Acosta understands the concerns about AI and the fear that technology will completely take over.
“I think it is important for us to make an attempt to make changes and make sure the tools we develop are for humanity, and not just for business,” he said.
As AI grows in various industries, it will disrupt, but it will also benefit, Acosta said.
“People will lose jobs. Jobs will change,” he said. “Instead of fighting the wave that’s coming, we need to be proper stewards of it, making sure AI is developed ethically.”
While technology is important, AI can’t replace the human experience, Acosta said, adding that humans understand nuance and express themselves creatively in unique ways that AI cannot replicate.
“The human experience, where we come from, our culture, those are expressions and they are valuable,” he said.
A Natural Born Helper
On top of his career at Splunk and outside interests in fashion, personal finance and travel, Acosta finds ways to give back to students at Cal Poly Pomona.
Curtis Carpenter, CPP’s director of Advanced Computing and an adjunct faculty in computer information systems, has gotten to know Acosta over the past two years. He’s been impressed by his talent, business connections and dedication to students.
“For several reasons, paying it forward by mentoring is really big to me,” said Carpenter (’16 computer information systems, ’21 masters in information systems). “I was mentored early, and that is one of the reasons I give back. So, when I see Johans’ desire to come back and support students, I just have a soft spot for people who mentor and give time.”
Acosta has served as a presenter at the AI Fair on campus, spoken at the Office of Academic Innovation’s summer conference, and has been a judge for CPP’s AI for a Better Future Hackathon. In the spring, he will teach ME 4990, a course for mechanical engineering students on building AI agents.
From volunteering with the CPP alumni board to speaking to student clubs to reviewing resumes at the Career Center, Acosta continues to find ways to give back to the university that helped shape his career.
“Cal Poly Pomona is a wonderful institution because of the social mobility it provides,” he said. “I definitely have had privileges. I grew up in Orange County, had two working parents. But I want to help people who don’t have the same upbringing as me or don’t have the same resources. I want to close that gap. And that’s why I am so passionate about AI. I see it as a tool to do just that.”